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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25693747">you have always been the place</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CobaltKicks/pseuds/CobaltKicks'>CobaltKicks</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, Feelings, First Meetings, M/M, Nine Hundred Years of Shameless Flirting, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:28:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,533</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25693747</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CobaltKicks/pseuds/CobaltKicks</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Life crashes over him like an ocean wave.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>324</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you have always been the place</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>let the statues crumble<br/>you have always been the place.<br/>-	The Type, Sarah Kay</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nicolò’s heard tell of the purifying fire of rebirth. He has imagined soft white flames of God’s light that will score him clean, and set him, complete, understanding, back on Earth.</p><p>But now he knows what rebirth is. It is the grisly pop of his joints realigning, the desperate, clammy reeling of his innards back into his fanned-out ribcage, the searing of his skin racing back together, his splintered bones twisting into place. It is gruesome. It is pain. And always, it is Yusuf.</p><p> </p><p>Life crashes over him like an ocean wave.</p><p>The water slides and coalesces, surges and washes down his spine. And then – it is no longer water. It becomes thick heat, matted hair, grit grinding between his teeth. Nicolò comes back to life dry with dust and sticky with blood. His stomach spits out the dagger. It drops onto the ground beside him. He is lying belly-up under the blanket of the night sky.</p><p>When the pain recedes and he can think, he can see stars.</p><p>Yes, stars innumerable. <em>So, this is still Earth, </em>he thinks, lifting a hand. Dirty and streaked with blood, but perfectly intact. It seems very pale in the starlight. God has made remade him, whole.</p><p>Beside him, someone stirs.</p><p>Nicolò turns his head.</p><p>The twisted, bloody abdomen of the infidel reforms itself around Nicolò ’s longsword. Nicolò breathes in in guttural shock. <em>Him as well? </em>Hadn’t this been his task – why would <em>he</em> be brought back as well --  hatred runs in rivulets through Nicolò, forms a stream, drenches him in anger.</p><p>The man groans. It sounds pained, confused, <em>human</em>. The man opens his eyes, they are dark, studded with starlight. Two worlds join in Nicolò; the world that has never seen this face before, and the world in which this man has been imprinted on Nicolò’s dreams for years. He gazes dazedly at Nicolò for a moment, and then his face hardens.</p><p>Nicolò staggers to his feet, grasping for the spear lying on the stones beside him. Across from him, the infidel does the same. Readies his curved blade, smeared with blood. Nicolò’s blood.</p><p>They lunge for one another at the same time.</p><p> </p><p>They are the only moving things on the battlefield, but Nicolò wouldn’t call them living. The infidel cuts Nicolò’s neck. Nicolò pierces his chest. They tumble together off the city walls. His tormentor imbeds a spear in Nicolò’s back. Nicolò splits his skull with a stone. The night flickers into daytime. How many -- ?</p><p>
  
</p><p>The infidel fights like air moves; sometimes holding still, little more than the shuddering heat of a mirage, sometimes a gale that breaks ships upon cliffs. Nicolò learns very fast. The sixth or seventh time, he blocks a strike that has killed him twice before and returns the favour.</p><p>The man chokes on his own blood, arms pulling ineffectually at Nicolò ’s foot where it iss planted on his chest. His fingers go slack and his hands slide down to his own chest, over the shredded remains his armour.</p><p><em>Please</em>, he is reduced to begging, <em>please let him stay dead this time</em>. <em>Please, what was it for if not to kill him? </em></p><p>There is silence, but not the holy kind. The only thing near to Nicolò is corpses, and under his skin are corpses all the more. The silence stretches from Nicolò to the man on the ground, still.</p><p>A hand twitches over the man’s stopped heart.</p><p>Nicolò sinks to his knees beside the body.</p><p>Exhaustion swarms him like a cloud of flies. He lets his head roll back towards the blossoming dawn. He doesn’t want to stop; he doesn’t want to sleep. Because what if – what if this was not the cure? What if he has travelled this far and brutalised and killed so many and there will still never be another night where his dreams don’t sing and shout and <em>beg</em> him to find this man?</p><p>“ليس مرة أخرى من فضلك,” the man rasps. He is frowning, eyes shut, as if he does not want to open them.</p><p>Niccolò understands.</p><p>He reaches for his sword.</p><p> </p><p>They kill each other once more before the army returns. Niccolò opens his eyes, brushes the grime and the dust from his eyelashes. He raises his cheek from where is has been pressed into the earth. He is lying on his side, his body curved towards his opponent.</p><p>Familiar eyes meet Nicolò’s gaze. The man reaches for Nicolò. Nicolò doesn’t flinch. Very softly, two fingers alight on Nicolò’s jugular, where the skin burns like a torch-flame, mending itself. The pain fizzles – becoming a candle – a sunbeam – nothing.</p><p>Nicolò cannot look away from the other man.</p><p>On the horizon, a great many people are moving. Suddenly, the man is on his feet, speaking in his waterfall speech. Nicolò blinks up at him. The sun makes the man’s black, curling hair into a halo.</p><p>The man clicks his tongue, with such a clear expression of impatience that Nicolò feels the corners of his mouth gently press upwards despite himself. The man bends towards Nicolò – he still doesn’t flinch – and pulls him up to stand.</p><p>Together, they stagger away from the heaped bodies. They don’t pause until the city walls have disappeared behind them. They make it into a valley and follow a dried riverbed as the sounds of battle and siege are swallowed up by the arid hills.</p><p>It is during this walk that Nicolò first thinks, <em>I am not like them anymore. I have become something else. </em>His countrymen and fellow-Christians died when they bled that much, and he, well. He watches the dark-haired man pick his way over the stones. The two of them have become all alone together.</p><p>The man catches him looking.</p><p>“N – ,” Nicolò tries and coughs. His throat has been re-knit so many times. He puts a hand over his chest, covering the bloodstained cross, and says, “Nicolò.”</p><p>“Nicolò,” the man repeats. The way he watches Nicolò reminds himof someone looking at the sun – face drawn together, letting in only the most bearable edge of light.  He gestures to himself, and says, “Yusuf.”</p><p>“Yosef?”</p><p>Yusuf huffs, and Nicolò thinks, <em>but it is alright. I will try again</em>, and wonders how he is so sure. He wonders if this could possibly be the work of the divine hand. He has been set messily down on a new trajectory. He doesn’t know where it leads, but it seems to curve around Yusuf. <em>Yusuf, Yusuf</em>, his name weighs on Nicolò’s tongue. It feels like an incorporeal string was woven between them when they exchanged their names – Nicolò is suddenly worried he will never be able to move too far away from this man.</p><p>Nicolò makes them pause under one of the spiny, broad-crowned trees at noon. They sink to the ground with their backs to the bark. Nicolò undoes his scabbard and presses it to his chest and sinks into a black and dreamless sleep.</p><p> </p><p>He is standing apart from Yusuf and the villagers, watching as his companion tries to barter Nicolò’s blood-crusted chainmail for food and clothes, when something prickles at the back of his skull. There is nothing else to do in the lifeless afternoon, so he follows the feeling, the mounting tension, tugging at it until it snaps taught.</p><p>Then the shouting starts. Nicolò takes off, running through the clustered houses until he sees them, the familiar banner of the cross still in the dry air.</p><p>There are ten or so of them.  One of them has an arrow notched; their arrogance crackles in the air. A single father holds out a shaking hoe with one arm, the other flung out between the pilgrims and his family.</p><p>“Wait!” Nicolò shouts without thinking. They look in his direction, earning the villagers a fragile moment.</p><p>He walks forward until he is standing between the villagers and the invaders.  </p><p>“I –,” Nicolò begins, and then something barrels into him. He sprawls in the dust, and scrabbles to his feet in time see Yusuf, a pale-fletched arrow protruding from his heart, topple over sideways.</p><p>There is no hesitation. Nicolò draws his sword and goes to work.</p><p>When he is done, he sticks his longsword in the dirt, and leans on it, gasping. The family had hidden in the closest house when the blood began flowing, so their secret is safe. His side stings where he’s been impaled by a blunt knife. He can’t quite believe he’s become the kind of person who bitterly wishes his enemies would bother to sharpen their weapons before goring him open with them.  </p><p>Yusuf will laugh about it. <em>Yusuf.</em> Nicolò casts about for him. He’s still crumpled on his side. Blood has pooled under him, no longer flowing since his heart stopped. Nicolò staggers over and kneels by him. He rolls him onto his back – Yusuf’s head lolls, eyes dull as pebbles.</p><p>Nicolò has never been so familiar with another man’s corpse.</p><p>He draws the knife that Yusuf carries from his belt and cuts the arrow out. It comes free with a wet sound, and Nicolò flings it away.</p><p>Then he waits. He taps Yusuf’s knuckles to get him to stir. Time becomes a dry trickle.</p><p>When moments have passed, or maybe hours, or maybe years, and Yusuf has still not moved, the first flicker of unease gutters underneath Nicolò’s ribs. Something is wrong. In the months of travelling together, slowly piecing together parts of one another’s languages, their separate lives, this was the first time one of them had died since the battle outside Jerusalem’s walls.</p><p>Nicolò’s gaze lands on the arrow. The shaft is smeared red, and sand clings to the sticky darkness. Panic coils in him like thunder heard distantly, from over the horizon. All those other times, he realises, Yusuf had died by his hand, by his alone. What if –</p><p>There had been a – something. A mutual understanding, between them. Nicolò has felt its soft turnings in his chest, ruffling, something softly beating at a cage.</p><p>“Wake up,” he hisses to Yusuf.</p><p>That part of him has gone abruptly still.</p><p>“Wake up!” he says again, none too gently.</p><p>Yusuf’s back bows off the ground. He groans, high and pained, face drawn in tightly.</p><p>He opens his eyes – they land on Nicolò, not really seeing him, then flicker across the sky, the bodies, the empty village square, then back to Nicolò.</p><p>“You killed them?”</p><p>Nicolò nods. Then, the chained, hushed thing in Nicolò’s chest, the thing that had gone limp and quiet when Yusuf died, comes back to life with violence, ripping itself free from its restraints. Nicolò gasps.</p><p>“What is it?” Yusuf asks, surprise thickening his accent.</p><p>It’s so familiar. Nicolò’s eyes burn. He buries his face in his hands.</p><p>“What?” Yusuf demands. He grabs one of Nicolò’s wrists, pulls it away from his face with surprising strength for someone who had been beyond the veil of life only a minute ago. “Nicolò, <em>what</em>?”</p><p>There’s no way to lie. “I just thought – maybe, if it wasn’t me who…”</p><p>“Oh,” Yusuf says. He releases Nicolò’s wrist.</p><p>Nicolò nods, gets up, and starts brushing down his clothes with a little more meticulousness than is strictly necessary. He’s aware he looks ridiculous, picking off grains of sand when they’re damp with Yusuf’s dark blood, but can’t stop himself.</p><p>“I didn’t think of that,” Yusuf says. He leverages himself up onto his elbows.</p><p>“You, ah –,” Nicolò says. “You took your time to come back.”</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Yusuf says slowly. “It won’t happen again.”</p><p>It’s a joke, clearly a joke, Yusuf wants Nicolò to smile at him, but he refuses to. Instead he nods stiffly.</p><p>“See that you don’t,” he says, and marches away to gather their belongings, meaning to leave before any more Christians return.</p><p> </p><p>He dreams of a thick forest, the greenery dripping wet, every tree-trunk a moss-bed. He dreams of a campfire, damp wood spitting steam and sparks. An axe lies close to a curled hand. Wood shavings litter the ground. He is looking into the eyes of a dark-haired woman with bright teeth, and knows she is incomprehensibly old, and doesn’t know how he knows this.</p><p>Nicolò jerks awake, and each ragged breath of bitter desert air <em>burns</em>. Yusuf sits bolt upright on the other mat.</p><p>His eyes flicker to Nicolò, not really seeing him, then around the dark walls of the house, and back to Nicolò. His pupils expand in the blackness. He exhales.</p><p>“We are safe,” Nicolò says.</p><p>Yusuf squeezes his eyes shut and leans back against the wall. When he opens them, he’s squinting at Nicolò.</p><p>“If we find them,” he says, voice hoarse with sleep, “do you think the dreams will stop, like they did when I found you?”</p><p>Nicolò presses his lips together.</p><p>“I saw a forest,” he says, instead of lying. There is no way to say he dreams of Yusuf in another way altogether these days.</p><p>Yusuf rubs a finger over his lower lip. “I saw a fire.”</p><p>“Someone was making arrows.”</p><p>“With black feathers.”</p><p>“It could be anywhere,” Nicolò sighs. He taps his fingers in thought.</p><p>“Not anywhere,” Yusuf says, “North.”</p><p>“I think I can feel it,” Nicolò says, because he can. “Like a lodestone on water.”</p><p>Yusuf looks at him across the room. “I just mean it was too wet to be near here.”</p><p>It’s dark, but he can picture Yusuf’s exasperated, warm expression.</p><p>“Alright,” he says. “We go North.”</p><p> </p><p>They work in Tripoli for a while, scraping together coin for passage across the sea, and by the time the ship they boarded has cast away, the gentle, feathered thing in Nicolò’s chest has made itself a home there. It seems to feed on the scraps of stories Yusuf tells him about his home, his colourful and unusual language, his bright rushing impatience, the way he clicks his tongue when something moves too slowly, how he’s quick to anger, quicker to laugh. By the time the ship docks, Nicolò is surprised there is any space left for air in his chest.</p><p>It is not helped by the string between them seeming to become shorter and shorter. It pulls closer and closer. After five years, Nicolò realises there is a word for this feeling. After ten years, he does something about it.</p><p> </p><p>They find the women from their dreams in a place that will come to be known as the Forest of the White Tower.</p><p>Nicolò knows they quite dangerous, are him and Yusuf, invulnerable as they are, and with their years of practice. When they fight back-to-back, Nicolò would call them lethal. This he learns, is child’s play compared to Andromache and Quynh.</p><p>When Andromache and Quynh move in together, death gods of every denomination hide their faces.</p><p> </p><p>The storm has been swelling on the horizon since noon, and at dusk the tight membrane of the sky cannot hold it back any longer; it splits like a burst lip and rain comes down in violent, angry lashes. Nicolò drags Yusuf by the hand at a staggering run along the forest road until they reach the monastery ruins – the sound of Yusuf’s delighted laughter in concert with the dark, desperate growls of thunder.</p><p>They burst through the broken door and collapse against the cloister pillars. Nicolò is gasping for air, with effort he rolls his head to the side and sees through the wet, plastered-down fringe of his hair that Yusuf is still smiling.</p><p>Nicolò’s eyes slide closed, the corners of his mouth turning up without his meaning to.</p><p>“You still like storms so much after centuries,” Nicolò says between gulps of air, “it amazes me.”</p><p>A few feet away, where the sheltering overhang of the cloister ends, rain pours in a stream into the courtyard.  Nicolò helps Yusuf to struggle out of his drenched-through wool cloak, letting it fall to the flagstones. A white whip of lightning cracks the evening. Above them, the wine-purple clouds finally blanket the last few rays of the orange sunset.</p><p>Yusuf holds out his hand in the rain, and Nicolò stands, dripping on the abandoned flagstones, watching him. Yusuf likes thunderstorms, and the night sky, and standing on a ship in the middle of the ocean, on a cloudy day, when the horizon is lost somewhere between the clear water and the aquatic sky and the pillars of clouds.</p><p>Infinite things don’t frighten him.</p><p>He has explained it Nicolò many times before, <em>I like to feel small, to feel like I am part of something vast. I feel like I am in it, and it is in me. Under my skin. </em></p><p>“You know,” Nicolò says, “there’s something here you should see.”</p><p>As always, Yusuf turns to him with the surety of a compass needle swinging north. Nicolò levels his gaze at him. Yusuf reaches out, hooks two fingers in Nicolò’s sleeve and tugs. Nicolò stumbles a step forward, feeling too heavy and tired to resist.</p><p>“Is it something I’ll like?” Yusuf asks.</p><p>“I hope so,” Nicolò says. Yusuf takes a handful of Nicolò’s dripping cloak in his other hand and pulls Nicolò forward another step.</p><p>“You hope so? You don’t know?”</p><p>“I said already, you still amaze me.”</p><p>“Oh, good,” Yusuf says, sliding his hand up the front of Nicolò’s cloak. Water sluices out of the fabric over his hand. “I wouldn’t want to bore you.”</p><p>He reels Nicolò in another step, until he can reach around the back of Nicolò’s neck and pull their foreheads together. Nicolò collides chest-to-chest with Yusuf, pressing him back against the cloister pillar.</p><p>Nicolò exhales, leaning into him.</p><p>“We should dry off first.”</p><p>“Inshallah, there will be some dry firewood in the stores.”</p><p>Nicolò nods. “Let’s go and see.”</p><p>Nicolò manages to coax a fire into being on the rectory floor, making sure to leave some wood for the next travellers seeking shelter who pass through, and they spread their outer clothes out to dry next to it. The storm shows no signs of letting up. He circles the room once, decides the doorway poses most danger, and lays down on that side of Yusuf.</p><p>Yusuf learned to stop protesting this around the sixth or seventh decade.</p><p>“This is it,” Nicolò says, and points his chin towards the ceiling. Yusuf looks up, his eyes glowing.</p><p>“Oh, Nico,” he says, laying down next to him, close enough that Nicolò can feel the warmth radiating through his damp shirtsleeves, but not touching. Above them, the grey rectory walls give way to a delicate and dramatic mural. “It’s beautiful.”</p><p>It is easy to get lost in this art, and they do. After a while, Yusuf says, voice quiet, “do you feel close to God here?”</p><p>“I used to,” Nicolò says. “I used to. Before I met you.” On the cool floor between them, Yusuf stretches out his fingers so that his little finger brushes against Nicolò’s. “I confused righteousness with holiness.”</p><p>These days, Nicolò finds, he feels the thrum of divinity when they listen to the stories of the sailors they meet at the harbour, when he quietly peels Yusuf oranges after dinner as Andromache and Quynh bicker over an event from centuries past, in the aftermath of action, when they restore people whose lives they’ve saved back to their families.</p><p>“But as you know, you taught a different way to be close to God. With actions.”</p><p>Yusuf takes his hand.</p><p>Nicolò has oscillated around religion for centuries, and has come to settle somewhere not quite wrathful, not quite peaceful. It doesn’t feel final, these few tenuous threads of forgiveness that he has extended to his God, to himself. He sighs.</p><p>“Sometimes,” he says, “frequently, even, I think that the only thing I’ve learned is that there’s more to learn.”</p><p>“That’s true,” Yusuf says, ponderously. “Your Arabic is still appallingly bad, and you’ve had <em>so many years </em>to practice – “</p><p>He breaks off laughing when Nicolò pushes his face away with his hand.</p><p>“Don’t blame the student for the faults of the teacher.”</p><p>Yusuf rolls onto his side. Nicolò mirrors him, one arm behind his back, fingers resting on his scabbard. Just in case.</p><p>Yusuf raises one hand to stroke Nicolò’s cheek, to tuck his hair back behind his ear. His fingertips leave a tingle trail on Nicolò’s skin like moonlight glimmering on unstill water. “But I can understand the compulsion of the painter who created this.” His eyes flick to the mural on the ceiling. “At the mosque, I appreciated the craft, the architecture, the skill that the builders and artists poured into making these buildings. But I didn’t <em>really</em> understand it. To be filled with such a love …”</p><p>He cups Nicolò’s jaw. His eyes have become dark and liquid.</p><p>“Such a love, that the ocean couldn’t contain it, much less a human soul. And to need to have somewhere to put it, some way to communicate it, knowing you could never show the depth and the colours and the facets of your love – not if you tried for a lifetime, not for a hundred. But at the same time, being helpless to try. No, that is something I did not understand until I met you.”</p><p>There is a beat where they look at one another, then Nicolò seizes Yusuf by the collar and kisses him. Yusuf pulls him closer, sliding his hand from Nicolò’s cheek through his hair, down between his shoulder blades. He makes a low noise and licks over Nicolò’s teeth, a very underhanded tactic that Nicolò responds to by pressing Yusuf’s shoulders back into the stones and rolling over him.</p><p>“Really, Nicolò? In a <em>church</em>?” Yusuf murmurs right against Nicolò’s mouth, mock–scandalized. “Is this the kind of thing you Catholic men find thrilling?”</p><p>“If the Lord is watching,” Nicolò says, “then we may as well invite Him to join us.”</p><p>“Hm,” Yusuf kisses him, and pauses, “I suppose He would a very selfless lover.”</p><p>Nicolò scoffs. “Unlike your other lover?”</p><p>“Oh, yes. My other lover is heartlessly cruel.”</p><p>Nicolò sits back. “Is that right?”</p><p>“You see, he’s not kissing me right now, as he could be.”</p><p>Nicolò trails his hand down Yusuf’s chest. He can feel Yusuf’s muscles tense and relax through the linen shirt. He slides it back up to curl above Yusuf’s heart. Nicolò knows Yusuf considers him to be one of those infinite things Yusuf adores. But that it is not quite true.</p><p>Yusuf notices Nicolò pause.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“I wish I was still sure of God,” Nicolò whispers, “so I could be sure of how it will be at the end of all things.”</p><p>They’ve had this conversation before, many times. <em>I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to be left by you.</em> Yusuf runs his hands up Nicolò’s arms, comforting, and then makes a little hum that Nicolò knows he has abruptly thought of something he means to share. Nicolò waits.</p><p>“Did you see the rose in the courtyard, <em>hayati</em>? The wild rose?”</p><p>“No,” Nicolò says. He had been looking at Yusuf, storm-swept, wild.</p><p>“When I saw it, I thought of you,” Yusuf says. “Growing through the ruins, fed by storms and lightning, but it had these – these, tender white and yellow flowers.”</p><p>“Stop it,” Nicolò says, trying not to colour. “Is it not enough for one day?”</p><p>“Never,” Yusuf vows. “In a thousand years, I’ll still be making declarations like this to you.”</p><p>“You’re intolerable,” he says, knowing that Yusuf knows he means the opposite.</p><p>“You’re in love.”</p><p>“If I take off your clothes,” Nicolò asks, “will that make you be quiet?”</p><p>“Well,” Yusuf stretches under his hands, and pretends to think about it. He runs his thumb over Nicolò’s slightly parted lips. “You can only try.”</p><p> </p><p>“It is a very clever equation,” Nicolò says, turning over the next page. It’s been years since it was published, but they have spent so much of the last century at sea, searching, and he’s only just been able to read the treatise that has re-written the language of natural history, or so the astronomer from the town claims.</p><p>Yusuf pours Nicolò more wine and fails to look impressed.</p><p>The drift-wood fire licks green for a moment. Yusuf flattens his map over his knees, humming over it. Somewhere in the blackness a few metres down the beach from them, out of the glow of the fire, he can hear the sea waves shuffling themselves onto the sand.</p><p>It is a quiet, steady susurration that is perfect for reading to.</p><p>Nicolò has decided he likes books. He likes them very much. He is glad there are more of them these days. They have come ashore at Malta, and Nicolò has a creeping feeling they will be going north from here.</p><p>He doesn’t really enjoy mathematical theorems that much, but the astronomer had been <em>so</em> enthusiastic after Nicolò’s remark about having read Johannes Kepler (stretching the definition of <em>read</em> quite to breaking point and steadily not meeting Yusuf’s eyes), and Nicolò got the sense that she didn’t get the chance to discuss her passion for studying the Heavens very often.</p><p>“Now I can mathematically calculate it,” Nicolò says, tracing his finger along the dense text.</p><p>“Calculate what?” Yusuf asks.</p><p>“The size of the gravitational force that holds me in orbit around you.”</p><p>Yusuf looks across at him. “It’s gravity, is it?”</p><p>“Must be,” Nicolò says. He picks up his glass of wine and sips.</p><p>The fire dances in Yusuf’s eyes.</p><p>“Nothing else?”</p><p>“Nothing that comes to mind,” Nicolò says.</p><p>He feels Yusuf move to sit behind him, stretching his bare-footed legs out on the sand either side of Nicolò’s hips. Nicolò leans back against his chest. Yusuf hooks his chin over Nicolò’s shoulder and looks down at the yellow - lit pages.</p><p>“See here,” Nicolò turns to the derived law. He translates slowly, because it involves him finding the word for the Latin phrase in Ligurian and <em>then</em> translating to Arabic. Yusuf never learned Latin to fluency, and both history and Nicolò seem to agree it is a waste of even their unlimited time. “The gravitational force is proportional to the inverse of the distance multiplied by itself. The closer we are, the stronger it is.”</p><p>“Hmn,” Yusuf says, and by an increment even Newton would find hard to calculate, shifts closer to Nicolò.</p><p>“And you can make a precise computation, if you know these values.”</p><p>Nicolò enjoys precise things. Yusuf snags Nicolò’s wine cup from his hand and tips back his head to drink. This is more than a little distracting.</p><p>“And what if the distance is zero?” he asks.</p><p>“Then the force,” Nicolò says, and has to work this time to keep his voice light, knowing that Yusuf can tell either way, “becomes infinite.”</p><p>He holds out his hand for his wine.</p><p>“Is that so?” Yusuf murmurs into Nicolò’s hair, voice a little low. He returns the cup to Nicolò’s hand. “You know, he couldn’t have done it without Abu'l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s work on acceleration first?”</p><p>“Oh, not a chance,” Nicolò says. “Or Ibn Bajjah, for that matter.”</p><p>Yusuf puts a warm hand over the inside of Nicolò’s knee, and he suddenly doesn’t feel like reading about mechanics anymore. He closes the book, wraps the book in canvas, and carefully sets it aside.</p><p>“Now, your turn. What were you reading?” He asks.</p><p>“I was only,” Yusuf’s thumb sweeps back and forth over Nicolò’s kneecap, apparently mindlessly, but Nicolò knows him better, “plotting where to go from here. Here --”</p><p>He pats the sand next to him, and Nicolò obliges, moving to sit cross-legged at Yusuf’s side. Yusuf settles back onto his elbows and tilts his face up to survey the clear night sky. The firelight continues to lap at the sand.</p><p>Yusuf picks out the North Star, and Nicolò’s suspicions are confirmed. Some years ago, he had mentioned he may be ready to go to Liguria – that seven hundred years may be long enough to have been away from home, and he has felt Yusuf waiting for the right time to steer them there ever since.</p><p>“We can sail to the mainland at –,” Yusuf traces their path with his finger through the bath of stars. Nicolò watches his finger slide over the diamond – dusted night sky, and his gaze follows Yusuf’s toned forearm down to where his shirtsleeves are bunched up around his bicep, the familiar curve of his shoulder, and finally alighting on the point of Yusuf’s throat, moving as he describes their journey through the cities. His voice is usually mellow and light – reminding Nicolò of sunlight on a field of wheat – but tonight, it is in pitch with the <em>hush-hush-hush</em> of the waves on the sand.</p><p>“And then --,” Yusuf turns and catches Nicolò unabashedly staring at him. “Nico.”</p><p>“Sì?”</p><p>“You’re not looking,” Yusuf says, smiling crookedly.</p><p>“No,” Nicolò says, smiling in return. “I’m sorry. Say again?”</p><p>“And then to Genova,” says Yusuf.</p><p>Nicolò presses his face into Yusuf’s shoulder. “Why?”</p><p>“So, I can practice my Ligurian with someone who will actually critique my dialect,” Yusuf says, and Nicolò thwacks him on the chest. “I want to see that place that made you.”</p><p>Nicolò raises his head. Maltan evening light is washing over Yusuf. He looks warmly at Nicolò through dark half-moons of eyes.</p><p>“<em>Habib albi</em>,” Nicolò says, “you are the place that made me.”</p><p> </p><p>By the time he takes a new name, Nicky has dispatched many, many people to the world after. He is a lover, he is killer. He is a holy cradle of conflict and always will be.</p><p>Sometimes, in the flow of a fight, when he cuts someone down – perfectly, without pause, he thinks, <em>is this what I was made to do?</em> And sometimes when he is carrying a coughing child out of a collapsed mine, tiny hands fisted in his shirt, he thinks, <em>this is what I was made to do</em>. And sometimes, when Joe gasps awake at night and tenses, then reaches for him, and Nicky holds Joe’s face between his hands until his breathing evens, he thinks, <em>this is what I was made to do.</em></p><p> </p><p>“We’ve had a postcard,” Nicky says, coming into the room. He holds it up to show Andy’s harsh handwriting – very rough for someone who lived through the invention of the written word – to Joe, who had been lying on the bed, a stick of charcoal of between his teeth, and sketchbook in one hand, the other behind his head, when Nicky had left.</p><p>He has since apparently given up on activity of any kind, and is sitting in the low hotel room chair, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, face turned up towards the ceiling.</p><p>Nicky does not blame him. It is very, very hot in Malta. The afternoon sun pools on the floor of the hotel room, the ceiling fan spins lazily and rather ineffectually above. Joe has done away with wearing a shirt – a necessity, but, Nicky thinks, also an improvement.</p><p>“Hmn?” Joe says, raising his head, squinting.</p><p>“Yes, she asks to meet us in Bruges. In one month.” Nicky sets it on the table. He slides into Joe’s lap. Joe allows his head to slowly tip back again, Nicky trails his fingers over Joe’s neck, where Joe’s skin is shining slightly. Joe’s hands – warm, well worn – come to rest on Nicky’s waist.</p><p>“I’ve gone soft,” Joe mumbles, eyes still closed. Nicky’s fingers pause in the slightly damp curls at the base of Joe’s skull.</p><p>“Never,” Nicky says. He leans forward slowly, resting his forehead in the hollow junction between Joe’s neck and shoulder. He smells good. Nicky kisses the point of his collarbone. He feels mellifluous, soft, yielding.</p><p>“I swear it wasn’t this warm when we met,” Joe says. He’s begun to trace something with his fingertips over Nicky’s spine.</p><p>“It was,” Nicky says. He turns his head, his nose brushing against Joe’s neck. He tilts his chin up. “It’s been warm ever since.”</p><p>He kisses the salt-dew stretch of Joe’s neck under the point of his jaw. Joe draws in a breath; Nicky feels it shuddering in his chest where they are leaning together.</p><p>It's strange – completely unreasonable – how he can still get a little touch-drunk on Joe. It’s been nine hundred years, but occasionally, the feeling of skin on skin softly melts every one of his muscle fibres, makes his head feel pleasantly heavy.</p><p>He allows the friction of soft skin catch his lower lip on Joe’s beautiful throat, allows it to drag a little.</p><p>“<em>Hah</em>,” Joe breathes. “Darling.”</p><p>Nicky lets his lower teeth scrape, just lightly, over Joe’s pulse point. Joe’s fingers tighten over Nicky’s hipbone, so fractionally someone else might not notice. He knows other people consider Joe to be guarded under his effusive smiles, but they don’t know him like Nicky does.  Nicky sees feeling goes right through him from nerve ending to nerve ending, ceaseless, unpausing, an arc of pure light.</p><p>“Sì?”</p><p>He kisses over Joe’s jugular – the same place on Nicky that he had touched for the first time ever, lifetimes ago. Nicky feels, rather than sees, Joe smile.</p><p>“You’re going to be the death of me.”</p><p>“You’re hilarious,” Nicky says, but he’s smiling, and Joe hooks his arms under Nicky’s thighs and carries them to bed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much for reading! </p><p>This would NOT exist without my friend A, who (a) suggested this film to me (b) tirelessly cheerled me during the writing and (c) did an extremely well-cited beta read for historical accuracy, there are not thanks enough on this planet for her!</p><p>The treatise I mention is Newton's 'Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica'. This was the defining piece of scientific literature that changed the language of science from Latin to mathematics. I just think it's neat! I do not think it's neat how whitewashed science history is. A lot of Islamic scholars contributed the development of classical mechanics, and their scholarship is completely disregarded in Western schools. </p><p>I'm @cobaltkicks on tumblr if you want to say hi!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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